Countless movies and TV shows have used Chicago as a backdrop, and the Windy City has been a more than capable star.
Dozens of iconic buildings and streets have served Hollywood over the years, including one brick building just to the southwest of the skyline that dates back more than 100 years.
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WATCH HERE“It dates back to the old bloody Maxwell Street days, when the huge market was here,” said Ken Wysocki, the creator of Filming in Chicago.
Wysocki knows a lot about the One Chicago franchise, a series of programs airing Wednesdays on NBC.
“This is a working police station on UIC’s campus,” Wysocki explained. “In the One Chicago Franchise, It’s important location, the exterior of the police station.”
The same building was also used a few decades ago in the 1980s series “Hill Street Blues," but that's not the only place you'll have seen it.
“Richard Gere filmed at this building,” Wysocki said. “For 'Primal Fear,' a great legal thriller from the early 90s.”
Only in Chicago
Another iconic downtown building has also played roles in plenty of productions, with Union Station taking center stage.
The south staircase is featured on screen countless times, but there’s one scene that trumps the rest.
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SIGN UP “This is 'The Untouchables' staircase,” said Kelli Marshall, the owner of Chicago Movie Tours. “It’s just the way it unfolds. It’s that contrast between innocence and death, which is of course going on all around that baby and mother trying to get up the staircase.”
Marshall gives tours at Union Station, and her customers always ask about that infamous scene.
“We know this scene was improv’d, it was not in the original script,” Marshall said. “Which I find fascinating. It’s about nine and half minutes, so it’s lengthy.”
People come regularly to take photos of the staircase. But, they aren’t the same stairs as seen in the gangster thriller.
“These stairs were replaced by Amtrak in 2015,” Marshall said. “They actually have a little bit of the stairs, they used to have them on display at the very bottom here.”
Down the stairs and into the Great Hall, the benches are a mainstay, and haven’t changed much at all.
“There are quite a few movies shot on these benches,” she said. “You have Tommy Lee Jones in a movie called 'The Package.' You have Gary Coleman, from a little movie called 'On The Right Track.'”
Finally, one surprising location is the South Shore Cultural Center.
You'd probably recognize the driveway and the outer columns from a scene in The Blues Brothers, as the duo sneaks inside the theater to take the stage in what is the climax of the iconic film.
“The pillars were white in the movie, so they’ve been painted but other than that it’s all the same,” said Chas Demster, the creator of www.itsfilmedthere.com.
Demster said the movie never used the inside of the South Shore Cultural Center, but another popular comedy did.
“Most of the camera work was looking this direction in 'A League of Their Own,'” Demster said.
Inside the solarium, the cast learned how to be ladies to go along with their baseball prowess.
Other films, including "The Dark Knight" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," also featured plenty of scenes shot around the city, with all of the websites listed within this story serving as great guidebooks to Hollywood's rich history of using the Midwest as a backdrop.
